As if Amazon doesn't have its collective hands in enough projects, Amazon Web Services has launched a new 3D game engine and a scalable service to make it easier for developers to build and deploy server-based multiplayer games. The game engine is called Lumberyard, a fully functional game engine based on CryEngine, it comes with a number of improvements and custom integrations. The service goes by the name GameLift and it's built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Together, they are meant to bring new customers to Amazon's EC2 cloud architecture and drive increased usage and engagement on Twitch.

The Unreal Engine serves as the core for any number of games across PCs, consoles, and mobile phones alike. When a new version comes out, the changelog is big. Really, really big. Not all of the changes introduced in version 4.10 affect Android, but a solid number of them do.

When the developers of Unreal Engine ship an update, they mean business. Version 4.9 was released late yesterday and its changelog is remarkably lengthy. Seriously, it's 36,950 words long and has 74 images, about a third of which are animated. It's basically the War And Peace of changelogs.

There are far too many things in this update to cover here, so game developers might want to check out the changelog in all its monumental glory. However, the list of Android-related items is a little more tenable and might be interesting to those who don't make a living (or hobby) out of building games.

Game developers have a new player in the game engine market, and it's one most of them already know quite well: Autodesk. At GDC Europe, the software company behind some of the most popular 3D modeling tools in the industry – 3ds Max and Maya – has announced the Stingray game engine to compete with the likes of Unreal, Unity 3d, and others. Alongside Autodesk's other design tools, it offers a seamless solution for game developers and designers to rapidly prototype and build high performance, cross-platform games.

Stingray is based on the Bitsquid game engine acquired by Autodesk last year. It supports testing and deployment to Android, iOS, Windows 7 and 8, Oculus Rift DevKit 2, PS4, and Xbox One.

Today, the CEO of Unity Technology David Helgason announced a collaboration with Intel to add x86 support to the company's wildly popular Unity 3D game engine. The news was presented during the keynote speech at the Unite 2014 game developers conference alongside announcements for upcoming support of Samsung's Smart TVs and Google's Android TV.

Helgason delivered the information pretty quickly, but it's not the kind of thing that requires a long introduction.

Both Unity 4 and 5 will be updated to include support for Intel Core and Intel Atom-based mobile processors. This will allow developers to build native variants of their games for ARM and x86 targets with very little effort.

Blizzard released Diablo seventeen years ago, and its effect on the dungeon crawler genre is still being felt. Take Archangel for example: ostensibly a technical demo for the cross-platform Unity game engine, this title could have used almost any kind of format to show off its graphical prowess. Instead it's a pretty brazen Diablo clone, including the supernatural themes and "kill everything that moves" gameplay.

Maybe that's a little harsh - the trailer does show off some special moves that can only be activated via touchscreen gestures, in a sort of mobile translation of the brush attacks from console favorite Okami.

The first rule of Fight Club, is you don't... Wait, that was Project Mayhem? Oh, and this one is Project Anarchy. So many great movie jokes ruined because somebody gave this thing the wrong name. Alright, let's just be serious for a minute.

If you're a gamer, you've probably heard of a little company called Havok. You may have even heard of a few games using its Physics engine like Battlefield 3, BioShock (1 & 2), Assassin's Creed (all of 'em), Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and a few hundred more. Ok, maybe Havok isn't so small, but it is moving aggressively to take on smaller devices.

If you don't keep an obsessive eye on video game development, you might not be aware of Unity. It's a 3D game engine that makes it easy to develop games for multiple platforms and multiple rendering engines, including Direct3D, OpenGL, and (on Android and iOS) OpenGL ES. It's not the most powerful or flexible thing around, but a lot of developers rely on the tool. Now they've got an easy way to estimate game performance on different Android hardware, via the Basemark X benchmark from Rightware.

Basemark X is also pretty impressive as a demonstration of the graphical power of Unity 4.

Papaya Mobile, the maker of the popular Papaya game and the social SDK behind it, today announced the upcoming release of the Papaya Game Engine for Android. The new engine is completely free to use and offers a number of benefits to developers looking to write Android games. It isn't available for download just yet, but it should be available shortly.

Before I proceed to the features, have a look at this quick video showing Papaya's 3D aquarium developed using the new engine in about 2 weeks.